Photographic Storytelling Quotes

You always want to come back with an image that's interesting visually, and you hope to get something from the person you photograph that's different than other images you know of these people.

Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

When I was younger, I did things with a camera I would not do by myself. I remember going down to the docks in San Francisco and asking a fisherman if he would take me out on his boat. I would never do that without a camera.

The business of making a photograph may be said in simple terms to consist of three elements: the objective world (whose permanent condition is change and disorder), the sheet of paper on which the picture will be realized, and the experience which brings them together.

Every picture tells a story, don't it?

It is a great honor for me to be compared to Henri Cartier-BressonBut I believe there is a very big difference in the way we put ourselves inside the stories we photograph. He always strove for the decisive moment as being the most important. I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. I don't work for an individual picture. If I must select one individual picture for a client, it is very difficult for me.

What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism.[this quality] is usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally by the cameraman.

When you work fast, what you put in your pictures is what your brought with yoiu - your own ideas and concepts. When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him.

While I was there I became deeply interested in photography, and indeed the most noteworthy event in my early life was winning first, third, fourth and seventh prizes in an international competition for college and high school students.

The pictures I take are not regular selfies. I give people a sneak peek into culture and lifestyles and experiences from around the world.

Photography speaks a universal language that does not need translation, and with an immediacy that the written word lacks. It freezes a moment in time, leaving an indelible image.

Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren't they one and the same?

I love creating. I had been really into photography when I was in college.

There are things that I teach, about building photographs, and that's why people come to my workshops. When people come to the workshops, they're consumed with seeking the subject, and I teach seeking the setting.

Photography has escalated almost exponentially! It is a language which covers almost every aspect of communication; factual and expressive.

I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.

I wouldn't mind doing Playboy again. But only if I had creative control.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews - talking, and listening, and looking, looking. ... And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole.

I have a master's degree in photography as a fine art, and I would call my work primarily conceptual. I don't carry cameras with me wherever I go. I get an idea of a subject matter I want to deal with and I pull out my cameras.

The still image continues to have a ton of strength. An image taken out of context from one fraction of a second to the next can tell a story, and if photographers are looking to tell a certain story, they can curate those slices of time to their advantage.

I'm always that annoying person that pulls out the camera in the middle of dinner and starts taking candids.

It's going to sound ridiculous, but knowing how to pose, how to maintain a level of engagement and variation for a day of shooting, is actually a skill.

I understood the craft of photography when done by an artist is art.

It's shot by Ben Rayner who I think is very talented at doing portrait photography as well as fashion photography. His images never look like a model. You know, it doesn't look like a faceless model just wearing whatever. There's always personality that comes through. That was quite important for me to capture.